World on Fire
by forthecoast
Summary: Nine months ago, he dreamed of this day. Now it's here, and it couldn't be further from what he'd imagined.


Title: World on Fire

Author: Ella

Disclaimer: My roommate made me give them back. Apparently we have enough emotional upheaval in here _without_ them.

Spoilers: NICU is _so_ last season.

Rating: PG

Category: JC/AL

Summary: "Nine months ago, he dreamed of this day. Now it's here, and it couldn't be further from what he'd imagined."

Author's Notes: I've had this idea in my head since about a week before NICU aired, and it's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. I was about ready to pay someone to take this thing off my hands when I took a break from studying for finals and pulled this thing out again. Much love to Chanie and Kess for tearing this thing apart with me. On a final note, song credits go to Sarah McLachlan - "World on Fire" and "Perfect Girl" from her Afterglow cd.

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_Hearts are worn in these dark ages  
__You're not alone in these stories' pages  
__The light has fallen amongst the living and the dying  
__And I'll try to hold it in  
__Yeah I'll try to hold it in_

--

It's only minutes after midnight when John Carter appears a few feet behind the windows of the nursery; darkness has long since washed over the sleeping city. The sidewalks below are covered in snow and ice, glistening under the glow of the streetlamps. In contrast to the black emptiness of the city sky, the maternity floor of Cook Country General Hospital is dimly lit by monitors and machinery, casting an eerie shadow that spreads throughout the nursery.

But even in the faint light, the newborn nursery is a safe haven easily welcomed in his current state of mind. For a man whose impending fatherhood can at best be described as a mistake, his visit to baby Jake in the NICU a week earlier raised his level of insecurity by a hundredfold.

Here, it's easier to convince himself that everything is going to go smoothly. That in just a few months time he'll have a perfect little family, everything he could possibly want.

Here, it's easier to gloss over the gaping hole in his heart that cannot be mended.

There, the daunting presence provided by modern medicine threatens his already distorted, fragile reality. No comfort in a closed off world where a two pound preemie is lost amongst a mass of wires, tubes, and life support machinery.

There, uncertainty became too much to ignore, leaving fear and doubt to overwhelm him for the first time since returning from Africa. Meanwhile, Abby found her bearings - a simple, quiet confidence in her ability to practice medicine.

Abby Lockhart was a woman who consistently defied all logical explanation. He could never find the words, even when they were on the tip of his tongue. As much as he tried, she was always just out of reach. And that was the part of her that captivated him still, that lead him to the newborn nursery when his shift ended over an hour ago.

The expression on his face is wistful, confused – part of him content to remain there and look on in peace, part of him silently wishing he could move past the glass barrier. She sits in the chair, rocking slowly back and forth, back and forth, holding the newborn infant close to her chest. The din of the nursery fades around the two as she smiles at the sleeping child.

Nine months ago, he dreamed of this day. Now it's here, and it couldn't be further from what he'd imagined.

He remains both enthralled and terrified, but his curiosity begs to get the better of him. His ears search to hear the answers that in his heart, he already knows.

And so he gets up his courage to intrude upon their peaceful moment. With all of the strength he can muster, he moves his feet step by step, hesitating only twice. Once as he approached the door that would lead him over the glass-partitioned threshold, once as he was about three feet away from the rocking chair itself. Three feet away from answers, shock, pain. Forgiveness?

Three feet away from her. Abby.

His Abby.

_She's not yours anymore_, he reminds himself. _Can you really say she was ever yours in the first place?_

Unable to answer his own question, he turns his body back in her direction and wills his feet to move forward.

She's cooing to the infant, seemingly unaware that she's under his scrutiny. Unaware that in spite of the past months of misdirection, mistakes and misconceptions, she's the one who holds the words he so desperately needs to hear.

He rests his hand lightly on her shoulder, praying silently that he doesn't startle her.

"Carter?"

"Did you have some sort of encounter with extraterrestrials while I was gone? Your ESP hasn't always been this good."

"There was a riot at a Trekie convention back in November, if that's what you mean." She averts her eyes in his direction long enough for a quick eyeroll, then returns them to the infant in her arms and continues. "ESP or not, the reflection in the window never lies."

Clever, that one is. Always with a straight face, too. So he wisely chooses to leave sarcasm to the reigning queen and move on to the matters at hand.

"She's beautiful." He reaches out cautiously to stroke the tiny features of the child's face. "Did Gina give her a name yet?"

"Abby. Abigail Christine." She's glowing, obviously touched by the sentiment, but who's to say that won't mask her innate ability to dish out sarcasm. "The poor kid is doomed before she's even a day old."

There's something genuine about the nature of her retort that he hasn't noticed before. Something is different about her – something that changed in the past six hours. He has no idea what that difference is, but in that moment, she's never looked so beautiful.

He searches desperately for another stalling tactic, not quite ready to delve into the more serious conversations that might follow. Unable to relinquish the sincere contentment of this one moment in which there's no pain, no suffering, no hurt feelings between them. It's genuine and comforting - everything they lost and left behind. For one isolated moment, everything is perfect.

Yet it's only an illusion, one so weak and fragile that a newborn infant's yawn is all it takes to break the spell.

"Weren't you off an hour ago, Carter?"

"Yeah, but I wanted to stay and finish up a few things." _And I wanted to see you. Just say it, he chides himself. Just say it._ "And I wanted to see ... the baby."

He regrets immediately that he could not say what he really wants to say because she counters with, "You should get home. We're fine here, and I'm sure Kem needs you."

His subconscious searches desperately for some trace of emotion - any emotion - in her words. It only fuels his confused, fragmented emotions further.

"Kem will be fine without me ..." _And I thought, maybe, you needed me, _he finishes silently.

She does not need him, though. He assumes she never really did. She doesn't need him, and Kem doesn't. But the baby - the baby does. His son. And he loves Kem - if for nothing else, for giving him this chance.

It's convoluted, contrived. Impossible. This is not how it was supposed to happen.

His doubts only come to him in moments like these. Moments when he sees all that she's become in his absence. He prefers to ignore the sensation that overwhelms him when he considers how much she's grown. It rubs salt in an open wound that is already raw and angry, demanding his attention. And he cannot let himself dwell on this, not when he has to focus on his child.

Tonight, however, he does not have the option of pushing those feelings to one side. For she starts speaking of her own volition, and he cannot force the echo of her words from his head.

"Gina was my patient when we first saw her in the ER," she begins cautiously. "She was maybe eight weeks pregnant at the time, and she was terrified. She was going ... to terminate. And now she has this little girl. She told me ... she said she knows she made the right choice."

She chokes on her own sentences, and he wonders what it means. He doesn't speak for fear that she might break.

"I never really felt like I had a choice to make."

Her confession comes quietly, but it resonates within him. A hundred questions rush to be the first one asked, though none are ever verbalized. Slowly, memories begin to fall into place. And he wonders ...

"You hear of women who end pregnancies for a million reasons. I didn't fit under any of those categories, and I still couldn't keep my child. I couldn't give my baby what it needed."

Finally, she tears her eyes away from the baby to face him. The emotions on her face both soothe and perplex him, though, for he cannot quite be reassured of the answer to his silent question. She darts her eyes to the far corners of the room as she finally reads his expression.

"Richard would never ... he couldn't have … I didn't even think he _wanted_ children."

He considers something she mentioned to him once, about Richard's second wife and new family. And something about her birthday - the one when she started drinking again. Pieces of her life that he could never quite grasp were suddenly within reach. He wants to offer verbal reassurance, but he finds eloquence lacking at the tip of his tongue.

Words have little or no meaning to him anymore. With her, words were never enough. Without her, words are already used and broken before they ever take shape.

Instead he places his hand on her back, willing his physical proximity to take responsibility for the message words failed to deliver. He watches her cradle the infant Abby and suddenly understands why her world was always one of such darkness.

He knows he should feel guilty for this glance into her world. It's a matter that is no longer his concern, and his past must be distanced from the present, locked away inside a box and carefully hidden. But in the kaleidoscope of emotions that wash over him, he finds that guilt is not one of them. It's uncertain if he even remembers how to feel guilt anymore; his perception of human emotion has been altered in an almost irreversible manner.

The illusion is broken when the vibrations of a cellular phone interrupt the silence of the nursery. While no words are exchanged, both jolt back to reality with the knowledge of who is on the other end of the line. He extricates himself from her grasp and watches as she slips away from him again. But this time she slips away to heal, and she is free. He, however, remains unknowingly trapped behind a clear glass cage.

He catches a glimpse of the three in the window as he begins to walk away.

_The reflection in the window never lies._

And it didn't.

They would have made a beautiful family.

--

_The riot in my heart decides to keep me open and alive  
__I have to take myself away from you  
'Cause I can't compete, I can't deny  
__There's nothing that I didn't try  
How did I go so wrong in loving you?_

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_Fin_

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